Fifty-five billion XLM tokens, over half the cryptocurrency’s supply, have been burned, Stellar Development Foundation CEO Denelle Dixon announced on Monday.
“We didn’t start by wanting to burn. We started by asking, ‘What do we need?’” Dixon told a conference. “As much as we wanted to use the lumens that we held, it was very hard to get them into the market.”
Stellar decided it made more sense to project how much it could actually use over a 10-year period and calibrate to that number, Coindesk reported. “To derive a plan from an arbitrary number serves no purpose,” Dixon said.
“I don’t know [how the stellar, bitcoin and wider cryptocurrency market will react], Dixon told Coindesk following the event.
“I really just don’t have a sense at all of what the market response is. From my standpoint, it’s how the ecosystem feels about it. We got a lot of positive response from the ecosystem because we are rightsizing what the foundation has and the foundation holds,” Dixon added.
The news was welcomed by holders of the cryptocurrency.
After the announcement that the non-profit organization had burned the tokens, the stellar price soared by almost 20% – adding over $200 million dollars to the cryptocurrency’s total value, Forbes reported.